The Day The World Disappeared... | Nimavenl
After enjoying the latest episode of The Walking Dead tonight, the world beyond the living room windows suddenly seemed to disappear.
As the fog rolled in and the footpath and houses across the street turned invisible, I couldn't resist the spectacle outside and - of course - took a gazillion photos. It isn't every day that the world practically vanishes, after all!
The street and the footpath below, the windows of houses across the street, trees beyond those houses and buildings in the distance - all gone. All that could be seen was what the photo shows - vague shapes nearby with lights behind them; the shapes only clearly recognisable as trees due to the brightness of the lights.
With so much of the 'known world' suddenly missing, we wondered - What would we do if a Walker [a zombie] suddenly appeared out of the mysterious haze? How would we respond to such a strange sight? Would we even react to flesh-eating zombies roaming our streets?
It's that last question that got me thinking. Would we even react to flesh-eating zombies roaming our streets? Would we understand in time that those who simply want to gobble us all up alive are a real threat and that we need to run, need to leave before it is too late, we all die and the world as we know it is gone forever? Would zombies make us finally stand up and say Enough, No More. Never Again, or would they first need to kill several million before we saw them as a real threat? Zombies may not be real, however what is very real is the way our society is changing and the way Europe is changing - the way we are becoming more cautious, more guarded, more scared. Not of zombies but of those seemingly wanting to change life as we know it and the way our entire world thinks, feels and believes.
Tonight, one of the country's best-watched current affairs shows featured several Jewish guests talking about how safe (or not) they feel living in The Netherlands. Not even seventy years after World War Two ended here (in May of 1945), there are guards in front of Jewish schools, guards in front of synagogues and whole families packing up, leaving for America or Israel or somewhere else where it's likely to be safer than here.
More and more I feel like we (Europe) are doing our best to repeat the horrors of the past, that we have not learnt anything at all from the Holocaust and from seventy years of history since.
This month it is Copenhagen.
Last month it was Paris. Last year it was Brussels.
Last century it was Buchenwald, Belzec and Birkenau.
Where will be next? What will the next target be? When will it be my country's turn? How many will die next time? WHEN WILL IT BE ENOUGH? When will we learn? When will we finally say Never Again and actually mean it?
